I get all the adultery I want.
It’s true. Ask Michele.
Thing is, I don’t want any.
You may have guessed this, but others may have thought Wha — ?
Aye, and there is the (naked back) rub.
I don’t want any adultery because I love my wife. This is true, and it’s the main, unspoken, foundational reason that comes way way way way prior to others I’ll mention in a moment. It’s the “Prime Reason” or “Reason Zero” and it comes Super Premium First and it’s always chugging along in the background, no matter how big a bastard I can be.
And since I can be a big one, I also have reasons for when I’m not especially fond of her, which is sadly what we sometimes mean by “I love my wife.” This is where the Foci on the Families and the Families Lives Today go wrong in much of their presentation, and the practice they push at us: because what happens when you don’t “love” (weak tea meaning) your wife?
What then?
OK, so it’s not like women beat down my door and I don’t get out much and so it isn’t likely anyway.
But on the off chance the Cubs win the pennant, my point is — and I do have one — or rather three.
1. God. I love God. Also badly, as far better (and worse) men have said, How can I do this thing?
2. Pain. Evil rips your guts out by your butt, feeds them back to you bloody. It’s how it works.
3. Stupid. What man with a modicum of mojo remaining would want another woman around.
It’s hard enough learning to live with just the one. Now you’re going to add an entirely brand new girl, with all her shit, and endless expectations, and baggage, and hideous habits, and did I mention bags of shit?
Possess you even a scintilla of common sense?
They don’t call ’em the opposite sex for nothing.
In a more visionary vein, Chesterton says keeping to one woman is a small price for even seeing one —
No restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself … To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking.
It reflected not greater awareness of and interaction with sex, but less. Debauchery, meanwhile, is random and indifferent. But focusing on that one woman we’ve been given takes dedication, commitment, perseverance, and work. All the things a man — need I note I mean a real one? — excels at.
We love work, and a woman is a lot of it, and one woman is enough of it.
And that’s focusing, working, and enjoying. If seeing one is exciting, consider seeing her naked.
Whoa.
She whom ’tis incredible to see, naked or otherwise, shall this not be enough, nay, more than enough?
OK, yeah, fine: more than enough in more ways than one but, really, so the heck what? Yeesh, dude.
“That man is a fool,” says Chesterton, “who complains he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once.”